One week before launch, and long after preorders launched, Nvidia is putting more cards on the table: The GeForce RTX 2080 will be faster than the GTX 1080 Ti. And the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti will be the fastest consumer graphics card ever released.
Nvidia spent the entirety of the GeForce RTX 20-series reveal hyping up the exciting potential of ray traced games, and understandably so—nobody expected ray tracing to be in mainstream games this soon, and gamers need to know what ray tracing even is. But the complete lack of information about the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti’s performance in traditional games left people wondering if there was an ulterior motive behind it. Could these pricey graphics cards be slower than their predecessors?
No. A couple days after the reveal, Nvidia said that the $700 GeForce RTX 2080 will be 50 percent faster than the GTX 1080 in traditional games, and capable of surpassing 60 frames per second at 4K resolution. Wednesday night, at GTC Japan, the company released a graph that confirms the GeForce RTX 2080 will indeed surpass the performance of the vaunted GTX 1080 Ti at 4K resolution, as you’d hope with a generational jump.
NvidiaGraphs are supposed to be hard math, but this one is anything but. The axis isn’t labeled, and the cards aren’t arranged quite like you’d expect going off pure performance results: The GTX 1070 was faster than the GTX 980 Ti, but this graph has the GTX 1080 just a hair above it. The chart also doesn’t disclose what games or graphics settings generated these results. And is it my imagination or is the gap between the two “Turing” RTX cards slightly smaller than the gap between the previous generation GPUs?
There’s no doubt what this image declares though: Both new GeForce RTX graphics cards will be faster than anything previously released.
Despite the GeForce RTX 2080 sitting just below the 60fps line in the image above, Nvidia previously claimed that it will surpass that mark in many modern games, although it didn’t share what graphics settings the card was tested with. Update: Nvidia sent out an updated image that shows the RTX 2080 straddling the 4K/60 line, rather than below it. We’ve replaced it above but left the original at the end of this article for reference. The new graphic also enlarges the space between the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, driving home the point that this graph is only a broadly representative indicator of performance
NvidiaCEO Jensen Huang also beat the drum yet again on the potential of Nvidia’s AI-enhanced Deep Learning Super Sampling, which presumably leverages the tensor cures lurking within Turing GPUs. The company says DLSS can “render crisp game images while running up to 2x faster than previous generation GPUs using conventional anti-aliasing techniques today.”
In addition to the list of previously announced DLSS titles, Nvidia revealed nine new games will support the technology, bringing the total to 25:
- Darksiders III from Gunfire Games / THQ Nordic
- Deliver Us The Moon: Fortuna from KeokeN Interactive
- Fear the Wolves from Vostok Games / Focus Home Interactive
- Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice from Ninja Theory
- KINETIK from Hero Machine Studios
- Outpost Zero from Symmetric Games / tinyBuild Games
- Overkill’s The Walking Dead from Overkill Software / Starbreeze Studios
- SCUM from Gamepires / Devolver Digital
- Stormdivers from Housemarque
The (theoretically) $699 GeForce RTX 2080 and $999 RTX 2080 Ti hit the streets on September 20. You can find full details about both in our initial GeForce RTX 20-series announcement coverage, and a wide selection of custom GeForce RTX graphics cards are already available to preorder.
Nvidia